Monday, May 26, 2014

Much of what Noemie Emery writes about the tyranny of the
experts-- the intellectual clerisy-- has been said before.

And yet, her statement is so well expressed, so clear, so
concise and so manifestly correct that it deserves special mention.

Profiting from a financial crisis and from years of agitprop
that had convinced the nation that voting against Barack Obama was proof of
racism, the intellectual elites used Obama as an instrument to impose their
will and their vision on America.

As Ford used to say, they had what they were convinced was
a better idea.

Emery writes:

In
February 2010, in the midst of the row over Obamacare’s passage, 80 highly
credentialed experts in health care, graduates of and teachers in the best
schools in the country, sent an open letter to the president and the leaders of
Congress insisting the bill be passed. The Affordable Care Act, they
maintained, would “cover more than 30 million people who would otherwise have
gone uninsured. ... Provide financial help to make coverage
for millions of working families. ... Strengthen competition and oversight of
private insurance. ... Provide unprecedented protection for
Americans living with chronic illness and disabilities. ...
Make significant investments in community health centers, prevention, and wellness.
... Increase financial support to states to
finance expanded Medicaid insurance coverage, eliminate the Medicare
prescription drug donut hole ... provide a platform to improve the quality
of the health care system ... [and] reduce the federal budget deficit
over the next ten years and beyond.”

Ignoring experience, disdaining the marketplace and the
people, the experts-- like Plato’s guardian class-- imposed their superior wisdom
on the nation:

The
Affordable Care Act looked for advice to academics, not governors, and proposed
the state takeover of an industrial complex responsible for one-sixth of the
gross national product based not on what had been proved to work through
experience, but on what some intellectuals had guessed might work. If a camel
is a horse designed by a committee, this camel was a 2,801-page non-bestseller
filled with labyrinthine riddles that nobody seemed to know how to solve. To
insure approximately 18 million out of 300-plus million Americans (they
confessed the plan would still leave 20 million uninsured), they proposed to
spend trillions on a reengineering of the entire system that would in time
cause 80 to 100 million of the currently insured to lose and to seek new insurance.

How badly did the experts miscalculate? Very badly, indeed.
In fact, theirs was nothing but a tissue of miscalculations based on a fabric
of mistaken predictions. Redoing the private market was far beyond their vision:

Apparently,
the possibility that the agencies that these experts assumed would coordinate easily
with the new health insurance bureaucracy and with each other would not in
reality be able to do so did not occur to the experts. They planned to move
millions upon millions of people from one set of doctors and networks to new
ones heedless of the fact that people form relations of trust with their
doctors and would resist losing them. They imposed health-insurance mandates on
companies that employed 50 or more people with little consideration that this
might apply a strong brake to the expansion of businesses and move millions of
people into part-time employment. They levied taxes on companies that
manufactured the medical devices that improved and saved lives, with no idea
this would lead to fewer inventions. They heaped new levels of regulation and
paperwork onto the shoulders of doctors and hospitals, with no idea that this
would lead many to think about early retirement. When the practical effects of
their theories ran into the realities of human nature, the market, and the
political imperative to appease constituents, the result was a blizzard of
waivers, exemptions, and extensions of deadlines. At this point, there is
barely a deadline that has not been erased or extended, a rule that hasn’t been
excised or rewritten to make its impact less lethal, and even the most frantic
of changes hasn’t made the system work well.

When reality came calling, the gauzy ideas of the experts
looked like a Big Lie:

Parents
found they could not take sick children to the same hospitals they had used
before. People with complex chronic conditions found that the teams of doctors
who had worked together to treat them had been broken up. For the people who
had been insured through the individual market the elites had little
compassion. Cancer patients who took their complaints to the press (and to the
Republicans) were “fact checked” and then viciously attacked by the Democrats,
among them Harry Reid, who called them all liars.

2 comments:

Let me fix that. Of the expert, by the expert, for the expert. To consider that this does not have anything to do with power, pride, the desire to control others is to miss the point.Anyone who considers themselves an expert needs to be distrusted and considered a fool. There is just too much we do not know about and can make large mistakes that can harm large numbers of people.

It is one thing to be conversant, maybe a master of, a subject, but a far different thing to be an expert.